I pictured the storage room at home—shelves lined with canned food, water filters, and medical kits sorted by expiration date. Ammo boxes stacked like furniture. A whiteboard on the wall with lists I had memorized.
Rotation schedule.
Contingencies.
Fallback plans.
My mother had died in childbirth, and then he’d lost my stepmother, Diane, in a senseless robbery when she stopped on the way home from work to pick up dinner.
He hadn’t been soft before, but now he’d become a cold man who expected things to go wrong and refused to be unprepared again.
Ben said the world only seemed stable if you didn’t know where to look.
So, when biology assignments piled up on top of everything else, labs, exams, group work—I did what I always did.
I adapted.
The copy machine in the faculty workroom jammed if you opened it too quickly. The lock on the filing cabinet became stuck if you lifted instead of pulling it. The bio teacher left her key card in the same place every day.
Patterns were everywhere if you bothered to notice.
I hadn’t taken the exam because I wanted an A. I’d taken it because Ben would have noticed the drop. Because one slip wasenough to get me punished, and I had enough on my plate as it was.
I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel, jaw tightening.
Lucas saw the result.
Not the cause.
No one ever did.
The drive home gave me time to think.
I kept the windows cracked despite the heat, the late-day Texas air rushing in, carrying the smell of pine and asphalt. My hands stayed steady on the wheel. Ben hated jittery movements. He said it could get you killed. I’d learned to present a calm front even if I wasn’t feeling it.
The road stretched out ahead of me, familiar and empty. Ashford fell away quickly—schools, fields, and houses giving way to pastures and forests. My phone buzzed once on the passenger seat. I didn’t look at it. If it were Madison or Brooke, it could wait. If it were Lila, she’d text again. Sometimes that girl was like a dog with a bone.
I took another calming breath.
The academic mess would resolve itself.
I already knew who would carry that weight.
Beck Maddox.
The name settled into my chest like a stone.
Beck's violence was contained just enough to pass as human, which is why I was hesitant to involve him. I had some doubts about whether I could handle him as easily as I did everyone else. But Beck owed me. Even if he wasn’t aware of it. Even if I wished I could forget it.
I tightened my grip on the wheel as the memory stirred—not fully formed, just fragments pressing at the edges.
A run assigned by Ben.
Too late and too isolated.
A road that was usually empty at that time of night.
I swallowed and pushed it down.
